Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things-but also to cope with them. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child-leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. A grown-up’s mind-even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim-lacked that elasticity. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. “It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind.
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